


I'm Gonna Haunt You

by sexysadie



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: 1968, Angst, M/M, Mentioned Francie Schwartz, Mentioned Jane Asher, Mentioned Yoko Ono, Relationship Issues, Smoking, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 21:20:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16710235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sexysadie/pseuds/sexysadie
Summary: A club in Soho, 1968. John and Paul talk about women.





	I'm Gonna Haunt You

**Author's Note:**

> It's fifty years since the White Album came out! This is set in mid-late '68, after the incident where Jane walked in on Paul and his mistress Francie. It makes me sad the Beatle women are almost totally unexplored and dismissed - here's my attempt to remedy that.
> 
> Title comes from the [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXn3BQ5pbig) by Fabienne Delsol.

She’d laid it out on the table, Paul said – one hundred and fifty pages of precocity. Convoluted, longer that it should have been, billowing out impossibly like the floor-length satin trousers she wore, picking up dust as she strode across the hardwood of the Apple offices. Leant across the desk, eyes shadowy under sooty lashes, low cut shirt concealing nothing. Rouged lips spelling out words like magic. She’d laid it out, _here’s my script. Here’s my proposition, Mr McCartney. I want to be a writer. I want to fuck a Beatle._

He’d taken it hook, line and sinker, of course; she went down like a spoonful of medicine.

In the hot, close dark of the booth, Paul’s cheeks were flushed pink and his eyes full of smoke. Roll him over and his soft underbelly would be exposed. John saw him as Francie Schwartz must have seen him on that day in the office, stood there all round-shouldered and confused in one of his pastel jumpers, the kind of guy to cook you breakfast and pay for your taxi home.

A soft touch. The tabloids said it, so it must be true.

“The one that got away, eh?”

Paul stared at the table for a hard moment, took a long, desperate drag of his cigarette, then a pull of his pint. Finally, he met John’s eyes, exhaled tightly. “Shut the fuck up, John.”

“Nevermind, son,” John continued happily, tapping out a jolly little rhythm on the table with his lighter. He’d always felt there was something a bit freeing abut other people’s misery – a relief that, for once, it didn’t belong to him. It was one of the things the Maharishi had scolded him for, and John had fucking eaten it up back then, before he realised that everything is awful and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Paul waved away one of the long-legged waitresses who’d been floating around them all night. He turned his head from her, eyes shut tightly, as though the sight of her smooth, bare thighs was making him physically ill. “Plenty of fish, or something,” John added, delighting in the way Paul’s mouth set in an unimpressed line. “Plenty of fucking whales, fucking sea cucumbers-”

“John-”

“What about that American bint? You were dead keen on her-”

“I swear to fucking God, you haven’t got a fucking clue.”

Paul’s voice had risen as though he was about to start shouting, eyes fiery and unfocused, cigarette all limp and crushed in his hand. Then, like scenery slipping past a car window, a series of emotions seemed to flit across his face – rage, then shame, then something very, very still, until cold, heavy misery finally draped itself back over his shoulders like a wet coat. John watched him calmly, like you might watch a match burning idly down to the tips of your fingers. It was oddly difficult to feel sorry for him, sat there all drunk and sloppy and un-engaged, until he remembered the sweet, soft skin and dark shock of hair that had brought him there and felt a little of that familiar slapped-hand sting of guilt.

“Who are you even sad about?” John asked, which seemed to stump Paul. He lit another cigarette silently and resumed looking at the table.

“I don’t know,” he said frankly. “I don’t know.”

“You’ll get another one,” John said softly, coaxing Paul’s eyes up with a gentle finger under his chin. They never went out anymore, but this evening, in the dark of some ancient fucking haunt in Soho, he was donning his blue hat and playing the peacekeeper. (What a saint). “Jane was a frigid bitch, anyway.”

Paul made a vague noise and looked away again. “Eloquently put,” he said, with no humour. “She wasn’t. We were going to get married.”

“So were we, once. Look how that turned out.”

“That’s _different._ You _know_ that’s fucking different.”

“How?” John pressed, suddenly curious and a little affronted. “How is it different?”

Paul chose to ignore him. “I could’ve married her,” he said despondently, poking at the smouldering ashes of his crushed cig on the table, and for some reason that hit John like a sudden, aching blow to the gut. A miserable quiet fell over them. John heard a woman’s tittering laugh cut through the warm, thick air and thought about Yoko, back in the echoing halls of Kenwood that suddenly seemed too big for two people. In the night, in that huge, hungry bed that swallowed her willowy figure whole, she’d whisper into his skin, _“we’ll get married someday. In the springtime, when the sun is low.”_

But still, even with the woman he loved pressed against him every night, he saw snatches of a taller, blonder someone disappearing around corners, heard sweeter laughter echo off of the walls that didn’t feel like his anymore. He knew that flickers of Jane’s red hair would haunt Paul’s peripherals, and that Francie’s dark eyes would watch him in the early hours of the morning, just like the eyes that watched John.

Absently, Paul flicked a finger against the side of his mostly-emptied glass. It made a round little chime and another waitress fluttered over as if tied to them on a string.

“Just- fuck off, please… will you?” Paul’s sentence had started uncharacteristically hard. As he remembered himself it turned softer, lost its bite, as he turned a grimace in the waitress’ direction. John watched her turn pink and flustered and leave the table with a little thrill of spite.

“Like bees to honey,” he murmured, lighting his own cigarette and then the one in Paul’s outstretched hand. Paul, who seemed a little brighter after his outburst, held John’s gaze stubbornly as he took a long drag. “Chainsmoking. Classy.”

“I am classy,” replied Paul unconvincingly. “I’m just having a bit of a failure in the class department.”

“You’re having a failure in the everything department, mate.”

Paul exhaled a cloud of smoke pensively. “D’you just want to elope?” he said suddenly, startling a laugh out of John. “Just go and disappear, I dunno… South America, somewhere they won’t find us.”

Once, that had actually been a viable option. John remembered discussing it in the dark of his bedroom in Liverpool, foreheads together, muffled under the covers, giddy from a mixture of alcohol and attraction. _Let’s get away, Johnny. Let’s go where they won’t find us, where they can’t stop us._ Back then, it had been terribly romantic. Now, it felt desperate – a last resort, a final attempt to cling to the driftwood of something that wasn’t there anymore, and Paul’s words sank heavy in his chest.

Perhaps, in some foreign universe, he could’ve married Paul and they would have avoided all of this. John glanced up at him, looked at his tangled hair and the lines beginning around his eyes, tried to remember the things about him that had made his breath come fast all those years ago.

They wouldn’t come.

“Yoko will miss me.”

Paul smiled a tiny half-smile. Disappointed, but not surprised. “I know she would.” He sank the rest of his pint in a business-like manner and leant back in his chair. He was about to leave; John was abruptly stricken with the sudden compulsion to beg him to stay, to suggest another club, to stop this – whatever _this_ was – from slipping through their fingers once again. His insides felt pinched as he sat and watched Paul shrug on his coat and fish a handful of notes from his wallet. “Well, my offer’s always there.”


End file.
